How to ensure your CRM implementation succeeds
or
How to guarantee yourself a successful career path!
By Simon Davis
Large IT projects in general and CRM in particular have received very bad press in recent years because of high failure rates and non-delivery. What is less well know is that there is long term evidence from both the US and UK that 75% of all efforts at transforming businesses fail and that 50-75% of all re-engineering projects fail as well. On that basis failure of your CRM project seems to be an odds on certainty! But it need not be. Looking firstly at the reasons for failure of change in general this Paper then looks at hints for success in CRM specifically. This is followed up with reasons why hosted applications can help minimise the risk and maximise the potential success. You will have a route map to avoid the traps so many have fallen into before.
WHY CHANGE IN BUSINESS FAILS
While there are often good reasons why some projects have failed because of the outside supplied element (the software) the vast majority of failures come from within the company. A short study of the principal reasons will inform our debate. The main reasons are:
1. Lack of planning and preparation,
Tunnel vision or lack of vision? If you don't know where you are going and where you want to get to and how you are going to get there how can you possibly expect to arrive? Or maybe you are focussing on the successful physical implementation of the software without looking at its impact on the people and processes. Any major change in business in the 21 st Century is a meld of the people, the technology and the processes – ignore just one and the whole project can fall apart. Never was the old nostrum ‘failing to prepare is preparing to fail' more applicable.
2. Unrealistic goals
This is both in terms of difficulty of degree of difficulty of the goals and the timescales involved. Unrealistic goals rapidly demoralise staff. This is often the case where senior management, sometimes Board level, is running a prestigious and costly project where that person has little grasp of the realities on the ground.
3. Poor communications
One person working alone cannot implement the whole project as it is likely to touch a wide variety of different people both internally and externally. Internal communications in even very sophisticated enterprises can be embarrassingly poor. Some employees may see change as, at worst, a threat, at best a distraction from their daily tasks. Have you got a team in place? Have you got the right team? Are the others in the enterprise ill-prepared for what they need to do to implement change? Have you communicated the advantages and what they need to do?
4. Inertia.
Inertia can be a many faceted issue within organisations. Is there a fear of failure engendered by the legacy of previous failed efforts? Has the organisation got an ingrained attitude problem, is it naturally risk averse? Is something new ‘not the way we do things around here?' Where the organisation is in an open and competitive, fast moving marketplace change can be forced upon it. Therefore although management and staff may be used to Change they may not be used to leading it. Alternatively slow moving organisations in areas that don't see rapid Change may not have the skill set to embrace or manage it.
5. Over complication.
Undoubtedly one of the reasons for failure of early cycle CRM systems was savvy and highly incentivised salesmen overselling over-hyped applications to Boards who liked to tick the CRM box. They didn't have to implement and run the results! The problem was then that all the changes necessary to make the integrated system work had to be made at once. This was intensely disruptive to the organisation and its people, it was the approach that was most likely to fail and resulted in massive costs in outside Consultants who were required to force the implementation though. This resulted in the hideous situation where the software was ending up as only 14% of the value of a contract. It was also this model that gave CRM a bad name with both customers and their customers.
Also always remember Change, even in the case of a single project implementation, is not a destination in its own right, it is a journey. Success, even in the event of very detailed, comprehensive planning, can be a moving target, something that gets further away the close you appear to be to it. And remember that history is littered with failed companies that were flavour of the month and then failed to adapt to changing circumstances…Wang and Marconi are two good examples. IBM, a company that has embraced change, almost died as a result of being unable to change fast enough and has metamorphosed into a completely different enterprise better adapted for the present day. Continued on the Next Page
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